Corporate Coder

MSDN TV has an episode on Software Factories that I found extremly interesting.  In this episonde Harry Pearson interviews Keith Short and Jack Greenfield on their book Software Factories.  This concept reminds me of the holy grail I have heard about in software development since I started, I think it was back when ENIAC was first deployed ;-)  .  That holy grail is that we developers should not have to write code, rather we will be architects of the code.  I don't believe that this will be reached in any time soon if ever.  But I do believe the idea of creating a software approach for a specific domain to speed up development is where this industry is heading.

I have to wonder what Ron Jeffries and the XP crowd would say about this.  IIRC, at a talk Ron gave our User Group, XP architecting is done by coding, not as a separate discipline.   The Software Factory approach would also seem to eliminate TDD (Test Driven Development) and other parts of the XP methodology.  Any XP'ers care to comment?  I'd love to hear any comments on this approach to developing.  Is anyone out there applying this concept already?